Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  It had been several months since they had been together.

  “I guess I’m going bald,” Pareti shrugged it off. He wiped himself down completely with a disposable moistcloth from the dispenser, and tossed it into the incinerator iris.

  “All over?” she asked incredulously.

  “Hey, Peg,” Pareti said wearily, “Fve been out for twelve hours, I’m whacked out, and I want to get some sleep. Now do you want to or don’t you?”

  She smiled at him. “You’re cute, Joe.”

  “I’m a pudding, I am,” he replied, and sank down on the comfortable bed. She came to him and they had sex.

  Then he went to sleep.

  Fifty years before, the Third World War had finally broken out. It had been preceded by thirty years of Cold War Phase II. Phase I had ended in the 1970s, when it was obvious that War was inevitable. Phase II had been the defensive measures against overkill. They had sunk the subterranean cavern cities, the “canister cities” as the sub-urban planners called them. They weren’t called anything as unglamorous as that publicly. In the press releases they were glowingly named Jade City, DownTown, Golden Grotto, North and South Diamond, Onyxville, Sub-City, East Pyrites. And in the Smokies they sank the gigantic North American Continent antimissile complex, Ironwall, two miles down.

  The breeding had started long before Phase I. Malthus had been right. Under the impetus of fear, people multiplied as never before. And in canister cities like Lower Hong Kong, Labyrinth (under Boston) and New Cuernavaca, the enclosed conformity of life left them few pleasures. So they multiplied. And again. And geometrically the progression filled the cannister cities. They sent out tunnels and tubes and feelers, and the Earth filled up with the squalling, teeming, hungry inhabitants of the land of fear. Above ground, only the military and scientific elite chose to live, out of necessity.

  Then came the War.

  Bacteriologically, atomically, with laser and radiation it came.

  It was bad enough on the North American Continent: Los Angeles was slagged. Iron wall and half the Smokies were gone, the missile complex buried forever under mountains that were now soft, rolling hills. Oak Ridge went up in one bright flash. Louisville was reduced to rubble. Detroit and Birmingham no longer existed; in their places were smooth reflective surfaces, almost perfectly flat like mirrored wafers of oxidized chrome plate.

  New York and Chicago had been better protected. They had lost their suburbs, but not their canister sub-cities. And the central cores of the metropolises remained. Battered, but still functioning.

  It had been just as bad, even worse, on the other continents.

  But there had been time during the two phases of the Cold War to develop serums, remedies, antidotes, therapeutics. People were saved by the millions.

  Even so . . . one could not inject an ear of corn. Nor could one inoculate every cat and dog and wild boar and antelope and llama and kodiak bear. Nor could one seed the oceans and save the fish. Ecology went mad. Some species survived; others died out completely-

  The Hunger Strikes and the Food Riots began.

  And ended quickly. People too weak from hunger cannot fight. So the cannibal times came. And then the governments, terrified by what they had done to themselves and each other, banded together at last. The United Nations had been rebuilt, and they had commissioned the companies to solve the problems of artificial foodstuffs. But it was a slow process.

  What they had only dimly realized was that the westerly winds, carrying all the radiation and residue of bacteriological lunacy, had swept across North America, picking up its additional loads over the Smokies, Louisville, Detroit, New York, and had carried the polluted and deadly cargo across the Eastern Seaboard, across the Atlantic, to dissipate finally in the jet stream over Asia. But not before massive fallout off the Carolinas had combined with sunlight and rain to produce a strange mutation in the plankton-rich waters of Diamond Shoals.

  Ten years after the end of the Third World War, the plankton had become something else. It was called goo by the fishermen of the Outer Banks.

  Diamond Shoals had become a cauldron of creation.

  The goo spread. It adapted. It metamorphosed. And there was panic. Deformed exo-skeletal fish swam in the shallow waters; four new species of dog shark were found (one was a successful adaptation); a centipedal squid with a hundred arms flourished for several years, then unaccountably vanished.

  The goo did not vanish.

  Experiments followed, and miraculously, what had seemed to be an imminent and unstoppable menace to life on the seas, and probably on the planet as a whole . . . revealed itself as a miracle. It saved the world. The goo, when “killed”, could be turned into artificial nourishment. It contained a wide spectrum of proteins, vitamins, amino acids, carbohydrates, and even necessary minimum amounts of trace elements. When dehydrated and packaged, it was economically rewarding. When combined with water it could be cooked, stewed, pan-fried, boiled, baked, poached, sauteed, stuffed or used as a stuffing. It was as close to the perfect food as had ever been found. Its flavor altered endlessly, depending entirely on which patented processing system was used. It had many tastes, but no characteristic taste.

  Alive, it functioned on a quasivegetative level. An unstable protoplasmic agglomeration, it was apparently unintelligent, though it had an undeniable urge toward form. It structured itself endlessly into rudimentary plant and animal shapes, none viable. It was as if the goo desired to become something. It was hoped in the research labs that the goo never discovered what it wanted to become.

  “Killed,” it was a tasty meal.

  Harvesting factories—the TexasTowers—were erected by each of the companies, and harvesters were trained. They drew the highest wages of any non-technical occupation in the world. It was not due to the long hours, or the exhausting labor. The pay was, in fact, legally referred to as “high-hazard pay.”

  Joe Pareti had danced the educational pavane and had decided the tune was not nearly sprightly enough for him. He became a harvester. He never really understood why all the credits being deposited in his account were called “high-hazard pay.”

  He was about to find out.

  It was a song that ended in a scream. And then he woke up. The nights sleep had held no rest. Eleven hours on his back, eleven hours of helpless drudgery, and at last an escape, an absurd transition into exhausted wakefulness. For a moment he lay there; he couldn’t move.

  Then getting to his feet, he found himself fighting for balance. Sleep had not used him well.

  Sleep had scoured his skin with emery paper.

  Sleep had polished his fingers with diamond dust.

  Sleep had abraded his scalp.

  Sleep had sandblasted his eyes.

  Oh dear God, he thought, feeling pain in every nerve ending. He stumbled to the toilet and hit the back of his neck a sharp, short blast with the needle-spray of the shower head. Then he went to the mirror, and automatically pulled his razor out of the charge niche. Then he looked at himself in the mirror, and stopped.

  Sleep had scoured his skin with emery paper, polished his fingers with diamond dust, abraded his scalp, sandblasted his eyes.

  It was barely a colorful way of putting it. Almost literally, that was what had happened to him while he had slept.

  He stared into the mirror, and recoiled from the sight. If this is what sex with that chnmied Flinn does to a guy, then I’m going celibate.

  He was totally bald.

  The wispy hair he recalled brushing out of his face during the previous on-shift was gone. His head was smooth and pale as a fortunetellers crystal ball. He had no eyelashes. He had no eyebrows.

  His chest was smooth as a woman’s. His fingernails were almost translucent, as though the uppermost layers of dead horn had been removed.

  He looked in the mirror again. He saw himself . . . more or less. Not very much less actually; no more than a pound of him was gone. But it was a noticeable pound.

  His hair.

 
; Assorted warts, moles, scar tissue, and callouses. The protective hairs in his nostrils. His kneecaps, elbows, and heels were scoured pink.

  Joe Pareti found he was still holding the razor. He put it down. And stared at himself in horrified fascination for several timeless moments. He had a ghastly feeling that he knew what had happened to him. I’m in deep trouble, he thought.

  He went looking for the TexasTower’s doctor. He was not in the sick bay. He found him in the pharmacology lab. The doctor took one look and preceded him back to sick bay, where he confirmed Pareti’s suspicions.

  The doctor was a quiet, orderly man named Ball. Very tall, very thin, with an irreducible amount of professional ghoulishness. Normally he was inclined to gloom, but looking at the hairless Pareti he cheered perceptibly.

  Pareti felt himself being dehumanized. He had followed Ball into the sick bay as a man; now he felt himself transformed into a specimen, a diseased culture to be peered at under a macroscope.

  “Hah, yes,” the doctor said. “Interesting. Would you turn your head, please? Good . . . good . . . fine, now blink.”

  Pareti did as he was told. Ball jotted down notes, turned on the recording cameras, and hummed to himself as he arranged a tray of shining instruments.

  “You’ve caught it, of course,” Ball said, almost as an afterthought.

  “Caught what?” Pareti demanded, hoping he’d get some other answer.

  “Ashton’s disease. Goo infection, if you like, but we call it Ashton’s, after the first case.” Then he chuckled to himself: “I don’t suppose you thought it was dermatitis?”

  Pareti thought he heard eerie music, an organ, a harpsichord.

  Ball went on. “Your case is atypical, just like all the others; so, really, that makes it typical. It has a rather ugly Latin name, as well, but Ashton’s will do.”

  “Stuff all that,” Pareti said angrily. “Are you absolutely sure?”

  “Why do you think you get high-hazard? Why do you think they keep me on board? I’m no G.P., I’m a specialist. Of course I’m absolutely sure. You’re only the sixth recorded case. Lancet and the AM A Journal will be interested. In fact, with the proper presentation, Scientific American might care to publish an article.”

  “What can you do for me?” Pareti snapped.

  “I can offer you a drink of excellent pre-war Bourbon,” Dr. Ball said. “Not a specific for your ailment, but good for the whole man, so to speak.”

  “Stop screwing around with me. I don’t think it’s a ha-ha. Isn’t there anything else? You’re a specialist!”

  Ball seemed to realize for the first time that his black humor was not being received with wild enthusiasm. “Mr. Pareti, medical science admits of no impossibility, not even the reversal of biological death. But that is a statement of theory. There are many things we could try. We could hospitalize you, stuff you with drugs, irradiate your skin, smear you with calamine lotion, even conduct experiments in homeopathy and acupuncture and moxibustion. But this would have no practical effect, except to make you very uncomfortable. In the present state of our knowledge, Ashton’s is irreversible and, uh, terminal.”

  Pareti swallowed hard at the last word.

  Oddly, Ball smiled and added, “You might as well relax and enjoy it.”

  Pared moved a step toward him, angrily. “You’re a morbid son of a bitch!”

  “Please excuse my levity,” the doctor said quickly. “I know I have a dumb sense of humor. I don’t rejoice in your fate . . . really, I don’t . . . I’m bored on this desolate tower . . . I’m happy to have some real work. But I can see you don’t know much about Ashton’s . . . the disease may not be too difficult to live with.”

  “I thought you said it was terminal?”

  “So I did. But then, everything is terminal, even health, even life itself. The question is how long, and in what manner.”

  Pareti slumped down into a Swedish-designed relaxer chair that converted—when the stirrups were elevated—into a dilation-and-curettage brace-framework for abortions. “I have a feeling you’re going to lecture me,” he said, with sudden exhaustion.

  “Forgive me. It’s so dull for me here.”

  “Go on, go on, for Christ’s sake,” Pareti wobbled his hand wearily.

  “Well, the answer is ambiguous, but not unpromising,” Ball said, settling with enthusiasm into his recitation. “I told you, I believe, that the most typical thing about the disease is its atypicality. Let us consider your illustrious predecessors.

  “Case One died within a week of contracting the disease, apparently of a pneumonic complication . . .”

  Pareti looked sick. “Swell,” he said.

  “Ah! But Case Two,” Ball caroled, “Case Two was Ashton, after whom the disease was named. He became voluble, almost echolalic. One day, before a considerable crowd, he levitated to a height of eighteen feet. He hung there without visible support, haranguing the crowd in a hermetic language of his own devising. Then he vanished, into thin air (but not too thin for him) and he was never heard from again. Hence, Ashton’s disease. Case Three . . .”

  “What happened to Ashton?” Pareti asked, a vapor of hysteria in his voice.

  Ball spread his hands, without an answer.

  Pareti looked away.

  “Case Three found that he could live underwater, though not in the air. He spent two happy years in the coral reefs off Marathon, Florida.”

  “What happened to him?” Pareti asked.

  “A pack of dolphins did him in. It was the first recorded instance of a dolphin attacking a man. We have often wondered what he said to them.”

  “And the others?”

  “Case Four is currently living in the Ausable Chasm community. He operates a mushroom farm. He’s become quite rich. We can’t detect any effect of the disease beyond loss of hair and dead skin. In that way, your cases are similar, but it may just be coincidence. He has a unique way with mushrooms, of course.

  “That sounds good,” Pareti brightened.

  “Perhaps. But Case Five is unfortunate. A really amazing degeneration of the organs, accompanied by a simultaneous external growth of same. This left him with a definitely surrealistic look: heart hanging below his left armpit, intestines wrapped around his waist, that sort of thing. Then he began to develop a chitinous exo-skeleton, antenna, scales, feathers—his body couldn’t seem to decide what it was evolving into. It opted at last for earthwormdom—an anaerobic species, quite unusual. He was last seen burrowing into sandy loam near Point Judith. Sonar followed him for several months, all the way to central Pennsylvania.”

  Pareti shuddered. “Did he die then?”

  Again, Ball spread his hands, no answer. “We don’t know. He may be in a burrow, quiescent, parthenogenetic, hatching the eggs of an inconceivable new species. Or he may have evolved into the ultimate skeletal form . . . unliving, indestructible rock.”

  Pareti clasped his hairless hands, and shivered like a child, “Jesus,” he murmured, “what a beautiful prospect. Something I can really look forward to.”

  “The form of your particular case might be pleasant,” Ball ventured.

  Pareti looked up at him with open malice. “Aren’t you the smooth bastard, though! Sit out here in the water and laugh your ass off while the goo nibbles on some guy you never met before. What the hell do you do for amusement, roast cockroaches and listen to them scream?”

  “Don’t blame me, Mr. Pareti,” the doctor said evenly. “You chose your line of work, not I. You were advised of the risks—”

  “They said hardly anybody caught the goo disease; it was all in the small type on the contract,” Pareti burst in.

  “—but you were advised of the risks,” Ball pressed on, “and you received hazard-bonus accordingly. You never complained during the three years that money was being poured into your account. You shouldn’t bellyache now. It’s rather unseemly. After all, you make approximately eight times my salary. That should buy you a lot of balm.”

  “Yeah,
I made the bonuses,” Pareti snarled, “and now I’m really earning it! The company—”

  “The company,” Ball said, with great care, “is absolutely free of responsibility. You should indeed have read all that tiny type. But you re correct: you are earning the bonuses now. In effect you were paid to expose yourself to a rare disease. You were gambling with the company’s money that you wouldn’t contract Ashton’s. You gambled, and unfortunately, seem to have lost.”

  “Not that I’m getting any,” Pareti said archly, “but I’m not asking for your sympathy. I’m only asking for your professional advice, which you are paid—overpaid, in my estimation—to give. I want to know what I should do . . . and what I ought to expect.”

  Ball shrugged. “Expect the unexpected, of course. You’re only the sixth, you know. There’s been no clear-cut pattern established. The disease is as unstable as its progenitor . . . the goo. The only pattern—and I would hesitate even to suggest that it was a pattern—”

  “Stop waltzing with me, damn it! Spit it out!”

  Ball pursed his lips. He might have pressed Pareti as far as he cared to press him. “The pattern, then, would appear to be this: a radical change of relationship occurs between the victim and the external world. These can be animate transformations, like the growth of external organs and functional gills; or inanimate transformations, like the victim who levitated.”

  “What about the fourth case, the one who’s still alive and normal?”

  “He isn’t exactly normal,” the doctor said, frowning. “His relationship with his mushrooms is a kind of perverted love; reciprocated, I might add. Some researchers suspect that he has himself become a kind of intelligent mushroom.” Pareti bit his thumbnail. There was a wildness in his eyes. “Isn’t there any cure, anything?”

  Ball seemed to be looking at Pared with thinly veiled disgust. “Whimpering won’t do you any good. Perhaps nothing will. I understand Case Five tried to hold off the effects as long as he could, with will power, or concentration . . . something ludicrous like that.”

  “Did it work?”